Nine Schubert Lieder [1838-1841]

Der Wanderer

Ihr Bild

Der Doppelgänger

Aufenthalt

Litanei

Der stürmische Morgen

Morgenständchen

Ständchen

Der Atlas

Between Schubert and Liszt there is a very special, if not unique relationship. Their lives overlapped by only seventeen years and they never met - although they were both among the fifty composers invited to contribute to the composite Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli round about 1820 - but Liszt was no less fascinated by Schubert than he was by a colleague as influential as Richard Wagner. Over the course of not far short of forty years Liszt based no fewer than eighty pieces on Schubert material of one kind or another and, inevitably, that close and prolonged contact with another composer’s music left its mark on his own development. It is arguable, for example, that Liszt’s great Sonata in B minor would not have been written without his experience of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy, which he arranged for piano and orchestra in 1851.

The song on which the Schubert Fantasy is based, Der Wanderer to words by Schmidt von Lübeck, was one of the first Liszt chose to transcribe for piano solo. Published as one of Zwölf Lieder in 1838, it is a vivid illustration of the frequently expressed observation that the more dramatic the Schubert original the more effective the Liszt arrangement. Even so Liszt’s treatment of the intimate middle section of what amounts, as he presents it, to a tone poem in C sharp minor is no less sensitive than Schubert’s own treatment of the same theme in the Adagio section of the “Wanderer” Fantasy.

Liszt’s arrangement of Schwanengesang, which was completed shortly after the Zwölf Lieder in 1839, is a strange publication. Of course, since Schwanengesang is not a cycle but an anthology assembled by Schubert’s publisher after the composer’s death, there is no reason why Liszt should have respected the order in which the fourteen songs first appeared. Indeed, there are good reasons why he should have re-ordered them according to a coherent tonal sequence. There are acceptable reasons too, in a piano transcription, for employing a whole series of virtuso keyboard techniques.

What is strange is that, while most of Liszt’s Schwanengesang arrangements contain nothing that is not an extension of Schubert’s precedent, however extravagant the elaboration, the eighth of them, Ihr Bild, subtly turns the song in another direction - not least by avoiding the minor chord at the end and going straight into the major harmonies at the beginning of Frühlingssehnsucht, the next number in the complete set. Of the next two items in today’s five extracts from Schwanengesang,Der Doppelgänger wisely adds little to the economically written but grimly coloured original, whereasAufenthalt is so excessive in heightening the drama with octave doublings, chromatic counterpoints and thunderous rumblings that Liszt’s conscience compelled him to supply a parallel version closer to Schubert’s own scoring.

Litanei, one of four Schubert song transcriptions published as Geistliche Lieder in 1841, is a highly intricate arrangement that somehow sustains the vocal line between the two fully occupied hands in the first stanza and elevates it high into the right in the second stanza. Der stürmische Morgen, from a selection of twelve Winterreise arrangements written in 1839, is another extraordinary concept, partly because of its massively stormy transformation of Schubert’s bleak original but also because of the inclusion of another Winterreise song arrangement, Im Dorfe, as a slower middle section. No less enterprisingly written but brilliant where Der stürmische Morgen is turbulent, Morgenständchen is one of the most successful transcriptions included in the Zwölf Lieder of 1838.

Returning to Schwanengesang, Liszt’s version of the other Ständchen seems comparatively modest until he adds a third stanza and extends Schubert’s liking for echoes into a delicately elaborate canonic treatment of the vocal line. Impressive enough as Schubert wrote it, with a piano part restricted almost entirely to the bottom half of the keyboard, Der Atlas might lose something of its tragic integrity in Liszt’s arrangement but certainly gains in heroic stature.